There have been several things recently that disturbed me about Google. At first I had just thought it was all benign, that they had free tools that were relatively easy to use. But now I'm beginning to question all that. Here's a few reasons:

Been playing around a bit with Tumblr (See http://fabrider.tumblr.com). It seems like twitter, blogging and del.icio.us all rolled up into one. All it really needs to be a del.icio.us killer is to incorporate tagging! Hope to see that feature show up on the site soon.

After nearly two years in the making and tons of hard work, Tactical tech has finally released this booklet.

See http://www.tacticaltech.org/infodesign

Its been a thrilling couple of weeks, watching the protests in Burma continue to gain momentum. I've had a number of queries about good independent Burma news websites and now have two that I'm pretty much recommending to anyone who is interested. See:

- The Irrawaddy at http://www.irrawaddy.org
- Mizzima News at http://www.mizzima.com/

A few weeks back I was visited by Noel Hidalgo here in Brighton. Noel wanted to interview me in Tactical Tech's office and talk about the work I've done with organizing groups and how I came to work for such a great organization.

Noel is traveling around the world and conducting interviews with a wide range of folks working on the intersection between social justice and technology, particularly open source.

I'm currently working on a report about ICT use amongst sex worker advocates and I've come accross two more fabulous videos (also see http://www.fabrider.net/node/45).

The first is a redo of U2's One Whore that was put together by Asia Pacific Sex Worker Network for the Star Whore show they did at the Intl. AIDS Conference last year in Toronto. It can be found on Blip TV at http://www.blip.tv/file/199048/

We've just completed two days of staff meeting/retreat at Tactical Tech. It's a very exciting time, lots of cool projects and a strategy around helping advocates/activists from marganilized communities handle information more effectively. We are also about to make a bunch of new hires that will hopefully make all of our lives easier

One tool that came up during our Sex Worker training in Phnom Penh (thanks to Melissa Gira http://www.sexerati.com, who has been working with us on the project) is Twitter. Bettysnake got on Twitter after some exposure to Melissa as well.

I'm in Phnom Penh for a meeting of sex worker advocacy groups from around the globe. Tactical Tech is doing work on helping these groups exchange information for both their global advocacy work but also for local advocacy. We just completed a survey of organizations and one of the most striking examples of use of media for an advocacy strategy (and there's actually quite a few) is from a group in Taipei calle COSWAS that have produced an excellent video about the plight of Sex Workers.

So even though I'm an avid fan of the Mac operating system, I try to use open source tools as much as possible (since part of my job is advocating that NGO's around the world use open source).  I've successfully weened myself off of Microsoft Office and now solely use Open Office (which I really do like by the way).  

I've tried to switch my web-browser several times.  Firefox is probably the best damn web-browser on the planet and it seems ridiculous that I use the Mac's Safari browser over it all the time, especially since Safari often runs into problems with certain scripts on web-pages.  The issue though comes down to performance.  Firefox running on my little Chicklet (my 12" power mac G4) brings the whole system to its knees.  I can't listen to iTunes at the same time without massive pauses - its extremely irritating!  Also the rainbow pinwheel will appear constantly and pause me in the midst of whatever typing I'm doing.  So I last maybe 2 hours in Firefox and then switch back to Safari.